Pages is behaving erratically

Question

Level 1

22 points

Pages is behaving erratically

I called into Support but didn't get an answer that fixed everything.

I've been using Macs for 30 years and have never had a problem like this. I am working on a 100 page document. There is a misnomer so I need to correct it globally (or on an individual basis just find something). I press the find button the find screen comes up, but it stays gray whether ( try to copy and paste or try to type into the find field.

This time, just a few minutes ago, instead of finding it took the file off the screen, didn't show its name in "recently used," and it looked like I had lost a day's work. Fortunately, it saved the document as t closed it.

I thought Pages had a relatively recent wrinkle that auto-saves wprk.

MacBook Pro 13″, macOS 13.3

Posted on Nov 17, 2024 11:50 PM

Reply

Answer 1

Nov 18, 2024 12:45 AM in response to Spinthrift

Your profile shows that you may be on an early release of macOS Ventura and you haven't stated what version of Pages is in use. The current version of Ventura is 13.7.1 and the last version of Pages compatible with it would be v14.1. It is important to keep the operating system and Pages versions current and version synchronized to avoid unexplained behavior.

As I save my Pages documents to the local startup drive, or occasionally to iCloud, I have never experienced autosave not working. You have access to older versions of a document via File menu > Revert To or Time Machine backups.

In all of the years that I have been using Pages, I have never heard of anyone pressing the Find button on the Pages toolbar and it launches inert with no means to enter content into it. Is this also the case when you press ⌘F to alternatively launch the Find window?

As for Open Recent menu items, that is a stack of past open/close document events. It does not clean out deleted documents until they are pushed off of the stack. It is dependent on your System Settings > Desktop & Dock > Recent documents, applications, and servers settings. Check that.

Reply

Answer 2

Nov 19, 2024 6:08 AM in response to Spinthrift

Pages uses versioning so you don't have to make backup copies.

Restore an earlier document version in Pages on Mac - Apple Support

There are also the recommended Time Machine backups to an external drive so you have an additional document recovery fallback. The time machine drive should be 2 - 3 times the capacity of your Mac startup drive.

Reply

Answer 3

Spinthrift Author

Level 1

22 points

Nov 18, 2024 6:15 PM in response to VikingOSX

Thanks for your help.

I upped to Ventura to the most recent version. That change didn't fix the problem. I started doing things like copying the text and pasting it into BB Edit. I ran the gremlin eliminator on the file that that didn't detect any gremlins. In the process of opening a copy of the file in Nisus, I made a docx file. When I opened that file with Pages it seems to have removed something that escaped all the other things I have tried. So I think there was something that somehow corrupted the file.

I hope I can always remember to save a backup file at the end of the day, and start a successor file for use the next day.

Reply